At Skype, I was one of the first product design people ever hired. The startup was still in its infancy, and it had managed to grow at a breakneck speed with a core group of hyper-talented staff.

Taking Ownership and Scaling

When I was brought in, I was asked to manage the small team of 2 designers and scale it up. I don’t think my manager used exactly those words. It was more like “you have to stop having product design being a bottleneck”. And “just make this all work!”.

In short, I was asked to own the outcome, not the process. The outcome was that the company needed to deliver easy to use products at scale. How I went about doing that was up to me.

Challenges of Team Growth and Organization

I quickly realised the team was under-sized by 5x compared to what the company needed. So my first goal was to ask, can I hire 8 more designers? To which the reply was, sure, just go find them and let’s reset your budget.

So I spent the next 8 months with my HR lead recruiting heavily for the best product designers in the world. Building talent and a bench is probably half the job of a product and design leader. You have to prioritise this. Otherwise it gets done poorly or not at all. And your team is understaffed or not world class.

Building a great team and managing egos

One problem that you have in building a great team is that many have been accustomed to be the best in their team. So you have many stars jockeying for the leading role. Managing egos is part of your job!

Another problem is organising your team so that the rest of the organisation has an easy “API” to it. This is sometimes known as building a services organization. The goal is to help the rest of the company know how to leverage your team. I ended up structuring my team across product lines. So each product line worked with their own team of designers. But the entire product design team sat together so there was unity in the experience.

Though it sounds easy, it’s not. It wasn’t clear that product design, which was 3 people then, should be 10 within 12 months. Why not 30, or only 4. Sizing a team is hard.

Organising wasn’t trivial either. We could have decided to have each group of designers work within their product line. A more satellite oriented structure. Or an amorphous group of designers who took on projects as they came in. More like a design agency.

It’s important to give some thought to the structure and size of your team. As this is a foundational part of your job as design lead.